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Writing pageby Andrew Coile
I went with my lover to visit our friend Ed. Ed was feverish and demented, and it was clear to me from too much past experience that Death was near.
I got a call the next morning from Ed’s lover Scott. He had left Ed to answer the door to let in the nurse. The nurse went to examine Ed, and then returned to the living room. Scott patiently explained to her that Ed had pneumonia, and that they had decided not to treat it. The nurse stared at him, and said, “Honey, how could you? He’s dead!” In that brief moment after leaving to answer the door, Ed was gone.
The one certainty in life is that we are all going to die. The only real question is “when?” Scott had called me because I was a one-stop shop of information on some of the practical aspects of death. To help other Scott’s and Ed’s (as well as our lesbian sisters), here is a brief primer on some of the basics of what to do if a spouse or close friend dies.
If a person dies in a hospital, press the Nurse call button—this may sound morbid, but you may want to wait a while if there isn’t a “Do Not Resuscitate” order on file at the hospital. The nurse will then summon a Resident doctor, who will pronounce the person dead. The attending physician (the person’s regular doctor, who has presumably been seeing them while they are in the hospital), will then sign the death certificate. At some point during this process, the body will be moved to the hospital’s morgue. After all the paperwork has been completed, the person’s body will then be released to a funeral home.
If someone dies at home and is under hospice care or some other licensed nursing care, the hospice or nursing company can send out a nurse to pronounce death, after which the body can be released to a funeral home. There are usually calls made to the attending physician and (in D.C.) the Medical Examiner’s office to complete the routine notifications.
If the person is not under hospice care, strange as it may sound, call the police on the non-emergency number. The police are required to investigate to make sure it was not a homicide. Do not call 911 and ask for an ambulance! If you do this, the rescue workers are required to attempt to resuscitate the person. This will not be pretty. If the person died from AIDS, death was probably not only expected, but joyfully welcomed. If you call 911, they will employ countless futile procedures in an attempt to raise the dead. Having a Living Will specifying “no extraordinary lifesaving measures” does not apply if an ambulance was called—it only works in hospitals.
After the police, and possibly the Medical Examiner, have decided that “death was expected,” they will release the body to a funeral home. Don’t be surprised if a police officer remains with the body until it is collected by the funeral home. If the police are not certain that it was a natural death, the body will be removed by the Medical Examiner’s office for an autopsy, after which it will be released to a funeral home.
One of the best funeral homes in the area is Rapp Funeral Services in Silver Spring. They have directors licensed in all three jurisdictions: Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. Back in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, many funeral homes would not handle people with AIDS. Rapp did. Many of those that claimed to handle people with AIDS simply subcontracted the work out to Rapp. They operate with respect for the dignity of the dead and with compassion for the living. They have buried most of my close friends.
After the body has been collected by the funeral home, the difficult decision of burial vs. cremation will have to be settled. If the deceased wrote a clause in their will specifying what they wanted done, so much the better. Unfortunately, a “next of kin” will have to give permission for the cremation (and you guessed it, a gay spouse is not considered kin). If you give permission for the cremation and the family didn’t want it, even if the deceased stated in their will that they did, the family can have you arrested for “assault and battery” on the dead body for having it cremated without their consent. Best advice: find at least one sane and friendly family member ahead of time who will respect the wishes of the deceased, and ask them to give the permission. A telegram will suffice as permission, as will a FAX transferring the authority for final disposition of the body to someone local, who can then sign the cremation forms. (The Maryland Assembly passed a bill, effective October 1, 1994, that allows people to sign their own cremation authorization in advance.)
There is unfortunately no legal way, if you are dead set, as it were, on cremation and your family is dead set on planting you in the ground someplace, for you to prevent it, except in Maryland. You can try, if you were planning on leaving them something in your will, writing a disinheritance clause if they don’t do what you want. But make sure they know about it in advance (registered letter, or something) so they can’t challenge it when it goes to probate. A judge might throw it out anyway.
Cremation has several advantages: it’s cheaper, and ashes are easier to dispose of. You can also split ashes between the lover and the family, which is usually not possible with a body. If the person wanted to have their ashes spread in a park or other public property, you can only do it quietly. It is technically illegal.
Don’t let anyone take advantage of your grief. One prominent funeral home refused to cremate the body until they had seen the will “to make sure the person really wanted to be cremated.” What they really wanted was to see how extensive the estate was, to get a better idea of how deeply they could gouge. If you are getting the hard sell, leave. Consider asking a close friend who is not wracked by grief to deal with the funeral home for you.
Like every other consumer activity, if you feel you are paying too much, you probably are. You can always “shop around.” Don’t get pressured into buying coffins with spring linings, “so the deceased will rest more comfortably.” The dead are beyond the ability of anyone on earth to provide them with more “comfort.” If the body is being cremated, it does not need a coffin. It can be cremated right from the body bag. For a viewing, you can even rent a casket. Unless there is going to be a public viewing, or the intact body is going to be transported by commercial carrier across state lines, the body does not need to be embalmed. Don’t get taken for frivolous extras that serve only to drain your bank account. If the representative of the funeral home starts to shame or blame you, they are unethical, and you should immediately go elsewhere.
The funeral home will also supply you with official copies of the death certificate. You will need one for each insurance policy the person had, and at least a couple of others. They are not cheap, and typically it is much easier to get them at the time compared to later, so try to figure out how many you will really need, and then get a couple more.
An obituary is basically a death notice placed in a newspaper. Most gay people have an obit run in the Blade and also in the Post. Obits in the Blade are considered news stories. The advantage of this is that they are free. The disadvantage of this is that the obit will be rewritten into a turgid obit “style” that is unlike any other form of writing. You will not be able to completely control the content, and they are subject to editing. The Blade deadline is 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday. If the person dies between Friday and Tuesday, I would suggest calling ahead to let the Blade know the obit is coming, because it helps them plan space.
The Blade will run a small photo of the person. Because they are going to be printed in black-and-white, starting from a black-and-white photo usually gives the best results. Otherwise, go for a good color photo with a lot of contrast, and remember that blue shows up as white, and red shows up as black. A color picture of a white person with red hair and a red complexion against a sunny window will make them appear to have changed race.
The funeral home can also help you place an obituary in the Post. The Post has two types of obits: the large type ones that are much more detailed, and the little teeny ones that look like classified ads, because they are. The large ones are free, but they are “news items” similar to the Blade’s, so once again you will have little control over content. They also will not list details of where the funeral or memorial service will be held, and they will, always, list the cause of death. If the Dearly Departed’s family doesn’t want the A-word spread over the inside of the Post, the only way to avoid it is by using the small obits. Note that spouses will always be “companions” in the Post.
The small obits are truly classified ads. They are paid notices, and you can list whatever information you want. You can also say the person died “after a long illness,” or not list the cause of death at all. The funeral homes are expert at wording these—place yourself in their capable hands.
There is a difference between a funeral and a memorial service. At a funeral, the body is present. At a memorial service, there is either no body, or only the ashes (sometimes referred to as “cremains”) are present. This terminology becomes significant when talking to the funeral home and churches.
If the deceased person was religious, contact their priest or rabbi to help coordinate funeral or memorial service arrangements. If you want a memorial service without overt religious trappings, many are held at the Friends Meeting House on Florida Avenue. Most churches will request a “donation” for holding a funeral or memorial service. The Meeting House does not, although they will accept one. I have even been to a memorial service at the Kennedy Center, and one at a local stage.
This is also a good time to get the family involved, if they want to be. Some people who know they are going to die have a full script already laid out for their service. Others leave friends and family to guess, creatively. Select music, readings, or other things that reflect the deceased person. Many services have an “open” section for the people who show up to share their memories of the person, which is interesting, because everyone has a different experience of the person who died. In this era of AIDS, most people will have already been to enough memorial services, or more than enough, to get ideas for planning one.
The timing of a memorial service is always tricky. If the death was after a long illness, the family may want a memorial service quickly, so they can go back home and get on with their lives. On the other hand, it takes a while for news to spread, and for an obituary to appear. One person had a “family and close friends” service two days after he died, and then a big (gay) memorial service about three weeks later. Memorial services three or more months after someone died are also not unusual.
You can usually find a friend with a PC, or worst case, a print shop, to do a program for the service. The programs with a picture of the person on the front are the most effective.
A reception following the service is also a common practice. This can range from punch and cookies, to a full-blown potluck, to a catered affair. It can be at the church, at someone’s home, or have even been held at the Eagle.
One way or another, a person’s “estate” (that is, everything they owned when they died) has to go to “probate.” Probate is when the will (if there is one) is presented, an “executor” for the estate is appointed, and the long drawn out process of dividing the person’s money and possessions begins. This is also where the family can get truly psychotic if they are not the beneficiaries.
Writing a will, picking an executor, and figuring out safeguards to make sure your money and property will go where you want is not a job for amateurs. Find a lawyer you trust—if that isn’t a contradiction—and get professional help writing and signing a will.
One word of caution: if for some reason you don’t write a will, the people you are closest to and care most about will be completely shafted. The law has no recognition of “families of choice.” Your lover can be forced to buy the house he is living in from your parents at prevailing market rates, and have to buy the sheets and furniture from your family. Don’t put anyone through this. You will die some day. Why put off writing a will?
Especially for gay men, who have seen their entire social circles of the 1970s and 1980s die off, dealing with the death of a close friend or spouse can just seem like the straw that broke the camel’s back. Anger, bargaining, depression, and isolation are all common feelings after being bereaved. You will start feeling that your non-bereaved friends “just don’t get it” about the magnitude of the loss you have experienced. After getting a “he’s been dead at least (pick a time period); aren’t you over it yet?” from someone you thought was a close friend, you will be tempted to retreat further into isolation to prevent your raw emotional wounds from having salt rubbed into them by unfeeling or unthinking people. Don’t.
Whitman-Walker has bereavement groups, places like the St. Francis Center runs workshops, and authors like Stephen Levine have seminars on “Conscious Living, Conscious Dying” that can all help you through the grief process. A bereavement support group is a wonderful place, because the people who are in there with you know exactly what you are talking about. And if you encounter bar-bunny friends who make stupid comments, tell them they’ve got a “rectal-cranial inversion.” There is no timetable for grief. If someone was important to you, there will always be flashes of loss, the emptiness that they are no longer here. The time between those flashes just slowly increases, that’s all.
Andrew Coile is an AIDS and gay rights activist who works as a computer programmer and lives in Springfield, Va.
Although submitted for publication, this article has not yet been published. If you’re interested, please email me.
Although you’d think that this would be the kind of practical information the gay community would be “dying” for (excuse the morbid pun), the Blade has been extremely reluctant to print it, and after a year, I’m doubting they will. Everyone who has read it has loved it (including the Blade’s receptionist, who said, “I made a copy for me and my lover. I hope we’ll never need it, but you never know.”).
I was concerned that my recommendation of Rapp Funeral Services was crossing an ethical line, but Washington Consumer’s Checkbook magazine rated funeral homes in 1995, and Rapp was top-rated for both quality and low cost. So I can’t be that far out in my opinions, if objective research confirms them.
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